


To Stand in the Past

by the_rck



Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M, Recovery, Sounding, Spies & Secret Agents, Time Travel, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-05 11:17:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15169553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/pseuds/the_rck
Summary: Later, Karl always thought of it in present tense. At any moment, it was both over and just beginning, smeared backward and forward through time so that it was constantly happening in the now. He had the layers of changing memories to tell him that nothing had altered enough for it not to have happened, not to still be happening. He just wasn’t there for it any more.He wasn’t supposed to remember it at all, not in general form and certainly not in details, but he’d gotten old in service before the now when he was young. The now was real, but he wasn’t letting anyone-- not the enemy and not his well-meaning rescuers-- take his past-future. It had happened, and now, it wouldn’t.Except that it had.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wearestardust](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearestardust/gifts).



> Title from Galway Kinnell's "The Seekonk Woods."
> 
> I wouldn't normally make a story this short chaptered, but there's some serious potential for stylistic whiplash between the first part and the second. I thought a chapter break might ease that a bit.

Somehow, the idea that he’d picked the right side in the war was less comfort than he’d thought it would be. He was no longer sure what the war was about or who had been involved, but he knew that his side would never, ever have done this to a prisoner. He held that truth as tightly as he could because he had nothing else. He wasn’t sure he even remembered his name.

His wrists throbbed, and his shoulders burned. He’d stopped pulling on the shackles, eventually, but not nearly soon enough, and his captors were still trying to make him struggle again.

His back was bleeding, and he had no idea what was currently in his ass, just that it was large and unrelenting. He’d pressed his body as close to the wall as he could get in an effort to escape the punishing rhythm. That hadn’t helped, only made the onlookers laugh at him.

By the sound of it, there were only two or three of them. He didn’t dare look to see because that was the one thing he could do that would bring certain and more terrible pain. One of his captors had told him that, the next time they punished him, they were going to start shoving things into his cock. He knew he didn’t want that.

He thought he didn’t want that.

It would hurt-- he could imagine how much it would-- but it would be _different_ pain. Different… He’d been in this room long enough to know that different meant a few seconds of not quite as bad before becoming much worse than anything before or after because it was _then_.

Present tense. Past pain and future pain weren’t real at all.

He pressed his eyelids shut and tried to convince himself that he could bear this a little longer. Only a little. That little time would give him something, had to give him something.

He was pretty sure there wasn’t anything but this room, though. The men who visited probably didn’t exist when they weren’t watching him or fucking him or torturing him. He wasn’t sure when he’d last slept or eaten or--

No.

He’d told them what they wanted to know. What was happening now was just because they wanted to and could.

He tried to steady his breathing a little. He thought there might be a place in his mind where he could go to pretend that his body didn’t exist. He just hadn’t found his way there yet. If he could find it, they could have his body.

He shuddered and sobbed because his mind and body were traps as much as the room was. Maybe it was all just in his mind already? Some sort of horrific and inescapable fantasy he’d made for himself? He sobbed again and let his body go slack so that his weight was only supported by the manacles that stretched his arms over his head. His wrists and his shoulders became the only parts of his body that existed as they screamed their agony at him.

As he’d hoped, he passed out.

****

He woke to pain. It wasn’t a surprise, but it was a disappointment. His arms were stretched over his head and anchored to the floor. His torn back was pressed hard against a solid surface that curved so that his head hung downward. He felt a pull along his entire body that told him that his ankles were as tightly anchored as his wrists. The only give was in his joints.

He tried to swallow a sob, tried to pretend he wasn’t awake. Even a few minutes respite might help. Maybe he’d be rescued. Maybe--

Rescue was a fairy tale he couldn’t even tell himself. Happily ever after wasn’t even--

Then he remembered and remembered and remembered. It was like standing in a hall of mirrors with each distorting the reflected image. The weight of more than a hundred refracting timelines slammed into his mind and drove him under as his memories rearranged themselves.

He heard himself scream. It was only a choking sound because his throat and vocal cords were raw, but it was the best he could do. His muscles spasmed, yanking his already stressed joints.

Anyone watching certainly knew he was awake.

As his new/old memories started settling into patterns, he felt a hand on his cock. He whimpered because that was what they wanted and because he dreaded what came next. He now knew it had happened before, just to another version of him.

To many other versions of him, all of them older than he was, all of them from his future. He’d already given his captors the key to finding the next, younger version of himself. He’d cease to exist when they captured an earlier version of himself because he’d never be where they’d caught his current iteration.

His head ached as he tried to make the logic of timelines and inevitability collapse into something simple. He had succeeded and succeeded and succeeded, and then-- He hadn’t. The part that didn’t make sense was that he knew that his successes-- the ones he’d been prevented from completing-- were solid as building blocks of the timeline where he was. They’d reverberated and settled to the point that time wouldn’t allow them to change again.

Which meant that pulling him out of time here-- and in the future-- was purely spite. They’d stop, eventually, because his life was finite in that direction, too, but-- All he could do was to pass the memories back. The self where it stopped needed to know what he’d been and what had happened.

He felt something pushing into his cock. It felt bristly, and his memories supplied images he didn’t want of a thing that looked like an extremely thin bottle brush. He tried to pull away, but there was nowhere for him to go. He felt the thing go deep inside and then twist. He’d have screamed again if he’d been capable of it.

The thing pulled out much faster than it had gone in. The pain of that speed surprised him, not because it was new but because he’d been focused on the previous pain. The next thing into his cock felt smoother and didn’t go in very far. Then the pain changed again, this time to a deep, almost electric burning. This pain settled rather than intensifying, but it was terrible enough to make him sob and try to beg for relief. His vocal cords couldn’t do that any more than they could manage a scream. He shook his head. He wasn’t trying to deny what was happening. He just couldn’t move any other part of his body as freely.

He felt another hand, this one on his balls. It squeezed, not quite hard enough to be a true distraction from the burning but too much to be ignored. 

His new memories suggested many options for what might come next. He didn't want any of them, and he had no hope of escaping.


	2. Chapter 2

Later, Karl always thought of it in present tense. At any moment, it was both over and just beginning, smeared backward and forward through time so that it was constantly happening in the now. He had the layers of changing memories to tell him that nothing had altered enough for it not to have happened, not to still be happening. He just wasn’t there for it any more.

He wasn’t supposed to remember it at all, not in general form and certainly not in details, but he’d gotten old in service before the now when he was young. The now was real, but he wasn’t letting anyone-- not the enemy and not his well-meaning rescuers-- take his past-future. It had happened, and now, it wouldn’t.

Except that it had.

He had sixty two good missions, solid things with echoing repercussions settled into the foundations of time to the point that they couldn’t be undone directly, but he only half-remembered any of them going right because they-- The Enemy-- had worked backward to pluck him out of time over and over again before he could finish. After the first few steps backward, they weren’t even trying to erase what he’d changed. They couldn’t.

He was a hero for all of that, because what he’d done was enough that the timestream settled his way anyway, but he also remembered--

The same room, over and over and over and always. The air smelled of smoke and blood and sex. He never remembered it, not then, because each time was earlier than the last in his personal timeline. Completely new. Unprecedented. Each iteration ate more of his future and more of his mind until he was complete at twenty three with fractal memories of pasts and futures that weren’t real to anyone else.

His knees always gave way. Sometimes it was horror. Sometimes it was exhaustion. Sometimes it was merely a predictable response to severe and abrupt temporal displacement. It didn’t matter. He ended up sprawled, face down, on cold, gritty concrete and listening to four hard soled shoes approaching him.

Usually, he made it about a third of the way back up before the needle went into his neck. Once-- he was certain he managed it once, at least once-- he’d gotten a look at the two men before he passed out. When he woke, he was always naked. He was always-- sometimes? --always bound or shackled or strapped down or-- No hope of breaking loose, not with human bones and muscles.

What happened next was more certain than any other part. Several men, not always the same ones, would talk about what a fine toy they’d gotten and how tight his ass looked. They’d offer each other bets about how long it would take him to start screaming or begging. Someone would run a hand along his spine, just a gentle touch to let him know that he couldn’t prevent it.

The talking part didn’t last nearly long enough. It also went on forever. The uncertainty ripped at his mind as much as the eventual rape and torture would rip at his body. The uncertainty didn’t break him, but he always broke before he remembered the future. He always gave them the path to the next self back.

As they got earlier in his timeline, they knew more about him and his weak points. They had more of his future to work with.

And, for a few hours or days, he knew less about what was going on than they did. He’d managed never to let them know when he remembered, but that was, he suspected, mostly because they weren’t looking for it, not at the point when they were just having fun.

By the end, they’d left him just enough unaltered personal history that he started out knowing who they worked for and who he worked for, enough to assume that he’d slipped and gotten himself caught. That time, that last time, he’d been rescued before it got too bad. Some of his older selves remembered near-rescues that ended badly, generally in his death. 

His youngest self had gotten a pension that amounted to a small fortune in the mail every month, a box of medals that he wasn’t supposed to remember earning, and a speech about how important he’d been to the organization, about how, even if he didn’t remember them, his ‘great accomplishments’ would never be forgotten. 

Then they’d sent him to a therapist who had helped a little but hadn’t understood anything at all about timelines or cascading memories. He’d had to send himself to a different therapist, one who hadn’t been born yet but who had known him when he was older. The commute for appointments was complicated, but he needed someone who understood, someone he could trust.

She owed him, and her relationship with time was almost as complicated as his.

No one in his present noticed his absences. Decades of infiltration work and social camouflage let him build a life that would hide that much. It was almost all lies at first, but it was getting better. He had friends who didn’t know anything at all about the horrors of a temporal war.

Time machines were fantasy. Everyone knew that physics wouldn’t allow that sort of thing. No one would believe that a music composition student would be able to build one. Karl wasn’t supposed to remember enough to be able to build one, and he might not have done it if he hadn’t thought he needed a real therapist.

Then again… Some day, he might be ready to identify the changes that needed to be made to prevent the war that had mangled his soul. He hadn’t told even Dr. Trilbin that much. She wouldn’t tell, but she also wouldn’t understand the point.

His oldest self had thought that his previous iteration would-- should-- find it useful to know what he’d done and what he’d become. If the memories had arrived in time, they’d have let him avoid capture. Then, the next few steps back, Karl had hoped that it would help to know that even the enemy couldn’t undo everything he’d achieved. It had. 

It also hadn’t because he’d realized, eventually, that it wasn’t going to end.

He just wished-- His oldest self hadn’t understood what he’d be asking his youngest to carry. His oldest self, his fifty four year old self, hadn’t realized that hope would vanish and memory break him as the past changed and changed and-- He was better now. He really was. He just--

Karl shouldn’t remember the way that a single line of pain from the first blow of a whipping hurt more than the last. He shouldn’t know what a fucking machine sounded like when it was near to burning out. He shouldn’t understand that wanting respite didn’t mean he wouldn’t have to suck someone else off, didn’t mean he couldn’t bleed more without dying, didn’t mean he had any say about who touched him or where or how deep inside his body.

It was all present tense. Still present tense. Possibly forever present tense. Dr. Trilbin said that time and memories could be like that. They had made some progress on changing the memories to a present tense that was distant as an often repeated commercial jingle, background noise instead of big screen and riveting.

He’d get there. His future selves needed help, and it hadn’t come yet. He wouldn’t abandon them.


End file.
